Chasing The Sunset

Chasing the Sunset

An endless exploration RPG campaign with drop-in, drop-out play.  Based on West Marches and Fellowship 2nd Edition

Cast of Characters

Learn about the characters and their cultures.

State of the Virtual World

2020 in review

Session reports

  • Legends of the Past

    • Spider-Witch, Tinker-Cyborg & swamp creatures
    • Harbinger, Tinker & library invaders
    • Dragon, Spider, Tinker, Fairy & Mermaid

Large, rotating cast

Most RPG campaigns are limited to as many players as can fit around a table. Chasing the Sunset supports an unlimited numbers of players, because not everyone plays every session. Players form ad hoc groups for each session.

One week, you may take the Orc, the Spider, and the Collector up the impossible Cliffs of Sacred Geometry. The next two weeks, you don’t play at all. Maybe other players do, who knows?  The week after that, the Elf calls you and the Angel to return to Copper Creek to defeat Old Snaggletooth for good.

The other characters are still in the world. If you run into them, they will help or hinder you, based on their opinion of your character. You leave instructions with the GM on how you want your character to behave when you aren’t there to control it.

Player-driven scheduling

If you want to play a Chasing the Sunset session, contact a few players you want to play with and decide on a time with the GM. It’s up to you to set goals for your character and create sessions in which to achieve them. There’s no set schedule for playing because there’s no set group of people to play with.

The players who want a session must arrange a place to host the session, and ideally also some snacks, too.  GM and host are separate duties.

You can’t pick your favorite people and pretend this is a standard party-based campaign by playing only with them. Each session you play must have a few different players than the previous session. Get to know some people and learn how your characters interact!

Common pitfalls avoided

The ad hoc groups and player-driven scheduling remove a lot of problems that make standard RPG campaigns difficult to commit to.

I can’t commit to a weekly game.
You are not expected to attend every game.  Sign up to play as often or as rarely as you like.

What if I don’t get along with my fellow players?
We’ll do our best to talk out differences and separate character-to-character struggles from player-to-player strife, but if you really don’t want to play with a certain person, you don’t have to. Don’t join sessions they schedule, and don’t invite them when you schedule sessions.

If I have to drop out, I’ll let everyone down
Fellowship doesn’t have strict party roles like some other games, and players don’t expect to play with the same players time after time.  We’ll miss you if you have to leave, but you won’t cripple the campaign.

I don’t want to be stuck playing a character I don’t like
You can retire a character you don’t like and create a new character from a different playbook. Your old character will remain in the world as the Boss of that location.

I live far away
I’m working on teleconferencing solutions so that I can support both remote and local players.

But how do I play?

At ground level, this is a Fellowship 2E game. In Fellowship you not only control your character, you are the source of truth for your character’s culture and people.  The world does not belong solely to the GM, but is built with contributions from everyone.  There are 20 playbooks to choose from, with varied and fun abilities like:

  • Lift and throw anything you can grasp, including your enemies
  • When you should die, fly into an uncontrollable rage instead
  • Seal an unbreakable pact with someone else
  • Heal others with the power of friendship
  • Remote-control body parts that are no longer attached to you
  • Reveal secrets by summoning glowing rain

Each player chooses a different playbook. No doubles!

When you do something interesting, you roll 2d6 plus a stat (-1 to 3). 10 or higher is a success, 6 or lower is failure, and 7-9 is where things get good, with partial successes, tradeoffs, and complications. So the math is simple, but the fiction gets really interesting really fast.

Fellowship 2nd Edition added Horizon mode which has rules for generating new locations to explore, and personal reasons that drive characters to explore. The longer characters stay in one place, the more dangerous it gets, so you’re always encouraged to stay on the move. Characters will spread out over a map that we’ll create as we go.  Notice boards in town squares and in transient camps let you pass information to characters that aren’t in your session. You may brag of your accomplishments, warn of nearby danger, or taunt that one character that you just can’t stand.

I want to join!

Great!  Send an e-mail to rpg@cliffnordman.com and I’ll add you to the list. I can provide the playbooks and rules. It would be nice if you had dice, pencils, maybe some scratch paper.